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My daughter convinced me to post a short video of me roughing out a block of limestone. No finished piece, no music, just the sound of the chisel and my hands doing what they've done for thirty years. It got forty-some thousand views and three commission inquiries. The carefully lit photos of finished work I post get maybe two hundred. I don't fully understand it and I don't trust it. But it made me think most people online don't want to see the art. They want to see the labor. The sweat and the noise and the hours. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just a different thing than I thought I was selling.

was cleaning up after a run of prints and my phone died mid-scroll so i just snapped the floor. pile of charcoal dust, torn paper scraps, half a cup of cold coffee sitting in the middle of it. posted it half as a joke, titled it "the actual studio." it did better than any finished piece i've put up in months. 4x the engagement, two dms asking about commissions, one guy asking if he could buy a print of the photo itself. and it's not even the first time. the messy shots, the process shots, the "here's my hands covered in paint" stuff always outperforms the clean documentation of the actual work. every single time. part of me is like, well, this is what people connect to, lean into it. but the other part wonders what it says that the actual art is the least interesting thing i post. like the product is boring and the labor is the spectacle. i keep posting the finished work anyway. i don't even know why anymore. stubborn probably. or scared that if i go full process-bro, the work just becomes content and i lose whatever i have left of the point of it all.

I used to do this thing where I'd tell people "pay what you can afford" because I genuinely believed in making art accessible and also I hate conflict LOL. But here's what kept happening: Someone who clearly had money would pay me $20 for a charcoal portrait that took me 6 hours. And I'd smile and say thank you because I SAID they could name the price and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. Meanwhile I had a single mom pay me $150 for a small drawing because she said "I know what labor costs and I want you to keep making work." The sliding scale only works if people are honest. And I realized I was letting the people who COULD pay more off the hook because I was scared to just... state my price like a real businessperson. Now I just say what it costs. If someone genuinely can't afford it I'll trade or work something out one on one. But I stopped making my pricing a charity auction where the rich get the discount. Anyone else do the "honor system" thing and regret it?